I had to do a tune-in of a brand new Toshiba large screen LCD TV and I scored a 2010 Panasonic TH-P42U20A 42" plasma TV for my efforts as it's got a fault that cause a dark band to appear in nearly the center of the screen caused by either a faulty COF or an intermittent fault on either the C1 or C2 buffer boards that provides power and drive to the COF's on the panel itself, although the panel is working fine at the time I wrote this post.

I decided to press it into service as a monitor on my media center PC for watching videos and TV with via HDMI from the computer's graphics board which is a ATI Radeon HD6800 series.

I finally caught it playing up and is was nothing more then a dirty flat cable to the COF (chip on film) that drives the middle of the panel, so I took the back off and cleaned the connector to the affected section of the panel and all is okay with it once again, also as a precaution I did all the flat ribbon cables from the signals board to the various drive boards of the panel itself.

I had scored an old 42" Hewlett-Packard Plasma TV from the Salvage Bin at work (Goodwill) for $7 but it was missing its original speakers and it had a bad Y-Sustain Board which made it so that the TV wouldn't power on properly, but when I went to try and buy a new Y-sustain for this TV on fleabay they wanted anywhere between $50-$200 for the board and that really sucked because it would of been a nice set fixed up but it was going to cost more than the set was worth to fix it, so I ended up scrapping it out. If you ask me Plasma sets aren't worth the trouble because if something like the Y-Sustain board goes out on one you're pretty much screwed because that part costs more than what the TV is worth to replace and you'd might as well just buy a new LCD TV for that kind of money. And the fact that Plasma TVs were notorious for eating through their Y-sustain boards (think of it as the modern day version of the old CRT sets eating through their flyback transformers) that's why they don't make Plasma TVs anymore.

orly? What's the usual problem with them? I've never worked on such tvs, but I'd wager broken solder joints on surface mount chips, and the like. Extremely common problem on most any smd component pcb. Xbox red ring, anyone?